Of Cartography ─ Poems

One of our generation’s most important literary voices, Esther G. Belin was raised in the Los Angeles area as part of the legacy following the federally run Indian relocation policy. Her parents completed the Special Navajo Five-Year Program that operated from 1946 to 1961 at Sherman Institute in Riverside, California. Drawing from this experience, her poetry, activism, and multimedia work speaks to larger issues of urban Indian identity, acceptance, adaptation, and cultural estrangement.

In this long-anticipated collection, Belin daringly maps the poetics of womanhood, the body, institution, family, and love. Depicting the personal and the political, Of Cartography is an exploration of identity through language. With poems ranging from prose to typographic and linguistic illustrations, this distinctive collection pushes the boundaries of traditional poetic form.

Marking territory and position according to the Diné cardinal points, Of Cartography demands much from the reader, gives meaning to abstraction, and demonstrates the challenges of identity politics.

Esther G. Belin is a Diné poet and multimedia artist. She is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, the Institute of American Indian Arts, and Antioch University. Her poetry collection, From the Belly of My Beauty, won the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Her writing has appeared in Wicazo Sa Review, BOMB, Democracy Now!, and Studies in American Indian Literatures, among others.